Therapeutic potential of infrared-treated bee venom: enhanced multi-faceted bioactivity via compositional modulation

Abstract Natural products are rich therapeutic sources, yet their translation into effective medicines remains challenging. Bee venom (BV) contains a diverse repertoire of bioactive molecules, but gentle, scalable methods to enhance its functionality are limited. This study, therefore, investigates a novel, solvent-free, post-extraction infrared (IR) conditioning step to fine-tune BV's composition and bioactivity. BV was irradiated (230 V, 50 Hz, 150 W) and compared to native extract using GC–MS and bioactivity assays. GC–MS revealed selective compositional tuning, with significant enrichment ( p ≤ 0.05) of 4H-1-benzopyran-4-one, 2-(3,4-dimethoxyphenyl)-3,5-dihydroxy-7-methoxy. IR-treated BV exhibited enhanced antimicrobial activity, with increased zones of inhibition for Staphylococcus aureus (15 ± 0.1 vs. 11 ± 0.4 mm), Bacillus subtilis (24 ± 0.2 vs. 22 ± 0.6 mm), Candida albicans (26 ± 0.1 vs. 22 ± 0.5 mm), Klebsiella pneumoniae (24 ± 0.4 vs. 15 ± 0.3 mm), and Salmonella typhi (27 ± 0.8 vs. 20 ± 0.7 mm). MICs decreased for S. aureus , B. subtilis , and K. pneumoniae . The treated BV also showed stronger antibiofilm activity at 25% MBC concentrations for K. pneumoniae and S. typhi ( p ≤ 0.05) and significantly reduced hemolysis at 25% MIC for S. aureus and B. subtilis ( p ≤ 0.05). Antioxidant capacity increased (DPPH IC 50 : 16.47 ± 1.1 vs. 27.65 ± 0.8 µg/mL), as did anti-inflammatory activity (COX-2 IC 50 : 48.84 ± 0.2 vs. 50.99 ± 0.9 µg/mL; COX-1 IC 50 : 24.7 ± 0.2 vs. 41.74 ± 0.2 µg/mL). Cytotoxicity against PC-3 and SKOV-3 cells was maintained (IC 50 : 19.73 ± 0.9 and 19.76 ± 0.11 µg/mL, respectively, vs. native BV's 11.48 ± 0.3 and 17.46 ± 0.27 µg/mL). These findings establish brief IR irradiation as a practical, scalable post-processing strategy to selectively enhance the therapeutic potential of BV for biomedical applications. Graphical abstract